by Josh Lowensohn

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The first thing that should come to mind when you think of Cooliris is photos. The company is well known for its imaging products, which include a very snazzy cross-platform browser add-on, an iPhone app, and embedded Web site and mobile phone technology. All of these are able to turn a collection of photos into an interactive, 3D wall, be it in on your browser, Web site, or cell phone.

But with its latest creation for
Apple’s iPad, called Discover, Cooliris is moving beyond the presentation and organization of photos and into something a little more pedestrian: text.

Discover, which hits the App Store on Tuesday, takes content from Wikipedia–both text and still images (but mostly just text), and splits it up into sections. These can be flipped through with your finger, instead of scrolling down a large page in
Safari. The app also keeps track of where you’ve been so you can retrace your reading path if you’ve gone several pages deep.

“When the iPad came out, we took an idea we had, and said ‘this is probably a perfect platform to try it on,’” Cooliris’ executive VP of products Michele Turner told CNET. “This new application takes structured data–in this case Wikipedia, as the starting point. We’ve then created a templatized starting page and structured data from Wikipedia to let users navigate the depths of Wikipedia in a beautiful and efficient way.”

The end result is a Wikipedia with larger text that can be read like an e-book, and photos that can be thumbed through and scaled up to the iPad’s full resolution. The app also takes advantage of orientation to reposition, or expand or consolidate the data it’s showing. Along the way, Cooliris serves up advertisements, which is where it can make some of its money given the app’s free price tag.

But why Wikipedia, and not a larger chunk of the Internet, as something like the recently popular Flipboard has done with RSS feeds? The short answer is that it’s not there yet, but it will be soon. Turner and company do, in fact, envision Discover as a platform for various data feeds from around the Web. “We have over 100 content partners in the mainstream Cooliris product,” Turner said. “The longer term opportunity is to work with the content partners to flow into this application, but that’s kind of down the line.”

Eventually the company plans to bring it to other platforms, including Android tablets. In making the iPad iteration of Discover, the company even built one for the
iPhone, though Turner says it didn’t feel quite right given the smaller form factor.

More pics of Discover can be seen after the break.

Josh Lowensohn writes about Web start-ups, video games, multimedia tools, and the occasional robot. He joined CNET in 2006, and posts to the Web Crawler and Webware blogs. E-mail Josh, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Josh.